FOI Ref: FOI/2021/3049
You asked
I am writing to you under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 to request data on the economic value of business contracts awarded to businesses outside of the UK, each year, over the last ten years.
Please answer my request by providing me with:
- The total economic value of business contracts awarded to businesses outside of the UK, each year, since 2011.
Please could you provide all of this information in Excel format.
We said
Thank you for your request.
In order to provide all of the information we hold in scope of your request, over 3,000 company casefiles would need to be manually interrogated to locate and extract the addresses. These files are stored in two systems as prior to 2016, a different system was used that has now been archived. The location of this information would involve three business areas: the commercial team, the finance team, and Digital Services.
Once this information is extracted, we would then need to cross-reference the address with Companies House data to discover where the head office of the company is located, as this information would not necessarily be recorded on the casefiles. This information would then need to be quality checked by the commercial and finance teams to ensure that this information is correct and relevant. Even if we were to do this, prior to 2015 we would be unable to perform appropriate quality checks, as our finance team have a retention period of 6 years for their data.
Our teams have estimated that this exercise would take a minimum 30 hours for each year requested, which equates to 300 hours for the full 10 year period. The cost limit for replying to a Freedom of Information request is £600 or 24-hours work and, in our view, we would need to greatly exceed this with your request. Therefore, Section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA) is engaged, whereby a public authority is not obliged to answer a request if the cost of complying would exceed the appropriate limit.
Unfortunately, owing to the scale involved for this work to take place, we are unsure of a viable option we could offer that may bring your request within the cost limit. Even if we were to supply this information for one year only, we believe this would still take a minimum of 30 hours to extract, which would still be in breach of the FOIA cost limit. Therefore, we would recommend limiting the scope of your request by a combination of factors to allow us to answer within the cost limit. These could include limiting the scope to a single category of contract (e.g. census, the COVID-19 Infection Survey, corporate services etc.) as well as limiting the time scope by six months. We would also advise further limitation by only requesting contracts with a value above £50,000.
If you choose to proceed with this option, please could your follow-up request also clarify what is meant by 'business contracts outside the UK'. We have currently interpreted this as contracts where the head-office is located outside of the UK, however we would like clarification of this in your revised request.
If you wish to submit this revised request for information, please get back in touch with us at FOI.Team@ons.gov.uk, and we will be able to assist further.
Alternatively, we published invoicing above £25,000 monthly via the following link: Payment to suppliers over 25000. This ranges for 2017 to 2021 and unfortunately does not include the company address. However, this does include the company name, if you wish to use this information to search for the addresses of the businesses.